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In the bibliographic report for 1995, I stated that the volume of work on Porter declined from the previous year. But in fact that was not the case. Several items published in 1995 simply had not yet been indexed by the MLA Bibliography when we went to press. Let's begin, then, with some belated entries:

1995 brought the publication of Robert Phillips's edition of William Goyen's letters, Selected Letters from a Writer's Life (University of Texas Press), a book that will be valuable for Porter scholars interested in biographical issues and issues of shared concern with craft. The volume includes twenty-two letters from Goyen to Porter, providing a generous sampling from their turbulent--indeed, at times wrenching--correspondence. By the way, Darlene Unrue published a searching and solidly scholarly review of the volume in Mississippi Quarterly, 1996.

Three valuable essays from 1995 were also not noted in the previous bibliographic essay:

Thomas Austenfeld's "What Makes a Western Writer? The Case of Katherine Anne Porter," Southwestern American Literature 20: 2 (1995): 35-42, presents a fresh view of Porter's regional identity, proposing that we think of her in relation to the West. After surveying pertinent biographical issues and establishing that Porter associated the West with death and violence, Austenfeld provides previously unpublished evidence of such an association in the form of a talk given by Porter at the Alexandria, Virginia Library in 1960, entitled "Westward Ho!" He then develops these associations in a reading of "Noon Wine."

Mary Burgan's "The 'Feminine' Short Story in America: Historicizing Epiphanies," pp. 267-80 in American Women Short Story Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Julie Brown (Garland), argues that Porter and Eudora Welty, as "founding mothers of the American modernist short story," thought about the short story in dialogue with the practice of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. The argument that Porter and Welty were finding ways to historicize the technique of the epiphany is persuasive and important. Burgan is correct that "the southern celebration of feminine sensibility . . . too easily erases the perceptions of slaves, servants, and the poor," and I believe that she is correct, too, in judging that Porter's stories resist a "reliance on private revelations" that would occlude such "historical realities." One very small quibble: Texan as I am, I have to protest against the notion that Miranda and Paul's ramblings in "The Grave" occur "in the woods."

Last, Mary Titus offers in "'A Little Stolen Holiday': Katherine Anne Porter's Narrative of the Woman Artist," Women's Studies 25 (1995): 73-93, a deep reading of "Holiday" as a text in which Porter tries to resolve conflicts between gender and vocation. Bringing to bear both biographical evidence and the drafts of the story found at the Humanities Research Center in Austin, she argues that the 1924 letters to Genevieve Taggard in which Porter claimed to be pregnant and to have borne a stillborn son are in fact coded accounts of the gestation of Miranda, that is, of herself as a professional writer. The narrator's "doubling" with Ottilie in "Holiday," and in particular their zestful ride on the funeral day, is an embrace of her own position of marginalization as a woman defeminized, under patriarchy, by her birthing of stories rather than babies.

Having voiced a friendly quibble at Burgan, I feel free to quibble at Titus as well for saying that Porter's childhood was spent in west Texas. Indian Creek, where she was born, was indeed, on the eastern fringe of west Texas, but Kyle is located in that ambiguous central belt between east and west. Maybe you have to be Texan to know what a great difference that makes. Or maybe you just have to be Texan to care.

1996

Books

Darlene Unrue's Katherine Anne Porter's Poetry (University of South Carolina Press) continues the work of her earlier "This Strange, Old World" and Other Book Reviews (1991) and of Ruth M. Alvarez and Thomas Walsh's Uncollected Early Prose of Katherine Anne Porter (1993) in making available previously uncollected or even unpublished material. The poems collected here will not change our existing labeling of Porter as a writer of prose fiction first and foremost. Poetry was assuredly not her strength. But they do, as Unrue says, provide a "commentary on her life and works" and an index to her intellectual views or emotional state at the time of composition. The introductory essay is sound and valuable.

Articles

Gary M. Ciuba, in "One Singer Left to Mourn: Death and Discourse in Porter's 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider,'" South Atlantic Review 61 (1996): 55-76, discusses the work of mourning in the story in terms of the Freudian theory of detachment and reattachment. That process entails, for Miranda, the adoption of an "anti-rhetorical rhetoric" and the rejection of "transcendent meaning in language." At the end of the story, Ciuba explains, Miranda cultivates a "self-conscious theatricality" in order to save herself from "radical identification with the deceased" Adam, but it is an artifice that will make the rest of her life "a cadaverous masquerade."

Tim Keppel's "Truth and Myth in Willa Cather's My Mortal Enemy and Katherine Anne Porter's Old Mortality," Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter 40: 1 (1996): 20-24, proposes parallels between these two texts that have not, to my knowledge, been previously discussed comparatively. Keppel does not argue influence, but does discern a series of verbal and thematic similarities.

Darlene Unrue had an essay in a volume from Western Illinois University Press, The Eye of the Reporter: Literature's Heritage in the Press, edited by Bill Knight and Deckle McLean. Entitled "Katherine Anne Porter: Journalism in the Evolution of Art," the essay summarizes the known biographical facts about Porter's work with newspapers and presents stylistic analysis. The articles Porter published in El Heraldo de Mexico, Unrue says, display "the first evidence of her mature style," combining "attention to facts and verbal clarity with her natural gift for creating sensory impressions." Despite her later disclaimers of the title "newspaper woman," her work as a journalist "contributed significantly to her art."

Dissertations

Kristin Carolyn Curry's dissertation at Emory University, "The Art of a Genteel Rebel: The Craft of Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction," DAI 56: 7 (1996): DA9536375, develops a conception of Porter as a self-representational writer engaged in "a continuing project of self-invention" whose "perceptive depiction of her characters' development illuminates the modernist preoccupation with identity." Porter did not, Curry argues, employ simple duplicity in redefining her origins, but repeatedly produced texts about female development as means of re-inventing her self. Making "strategic use of language" to construct chosen effects, she wrote fiction that she could regard as the substance of her own identity.

Christine Hanks Hait's "Outlawed Spirit: Gender and Creativity in the Writings of Katherine Anne Porter," DAI 56: 7 (1996): DA9538409, completed at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, proposes a pervasive image in Porter's work of the creative woman as a marginalized figure, an outlaw struggling to avoid entrapment. Silence and masking are strategies invoked for dealing with this sense of the woman artist as outlaw, but some characters, such as La Condesa, "act out their outlaw status . . . fearlessly assert[ing] their own authority and offer[ing] alternative visions of reality to those which their cultures impose."

The need to supplement the report for 1995 in this essay prompts me to urge all of you Porter scholars out there to let me know if you find that your work has not been reported. Demand a higher standard! Even better, demand to write the bibliographic essay yourself!